


Episode 3: Her Ability

by Cassidius_Wilde



Series: The Extra Adventures of Prep Betty and Jughead [4]
Category: Original Work, bughead - Fandom
Genre: Another Adventure, F/M, though it’s a bit angsty this time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-19 08:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29996403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cassidius_Wilde/pseuds/Cassidius_Wilde
Summary: She started presuming that maybe Jughead was cheating. She didn’t like thinking about it but there were endless reasons to indicate that he was.
Relationships: Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Series: The Extra Adventures of Prep Betty and Jughead [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2183637
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Episode 3: Her Ability

**Author's Note:**

> We took a look at Jughead’s pain in the previous episode, why don’t we see Betty’s this time??
> 
> Time: 15 years old

Hiding. That's one of the things she discovered about herself as soon as she stepped in the white, cemented walls of Ivy Academy - a phrontistery that holds troubled youths similar to that of military schools. They strive to train poor, little souls into possible future warriors and Elizabeth Cooper was the youngest female to get admitted and one of the best students in the whole system, if not more than. 

It was near impossible to be able to find her during visibility trainings, even when she made it easy by standing right in the middle of the field in one bush suit. It took them precisely two hours to find her—when she got bored and crouched down on the ground to give her legs a rest.

"Well, good job, losers," she praised her class with a roll of her eyes, sarcasm laced on her tongue like poison as they cheered like imperious baboons when one pointed her out. "You finally found me."

"Make it harder next time, will you, kid?" Jerry Brown, one of the most infuriating, loudmouthed people she had ever met, said with a smirk and Betty scoffed in disbelief.

_'Let it go, Betty,'_ she tried calming herself. _'He's not worth shit.'_

But, no. She didn't know how Jerry’s ass got in the school and even if he was four years older than her, it still didn't give him the right to call her that, especially when he achieved nothing in his life other than being a himbo.

She glared at him. One of the things Betty hated aside from liars is when some arrogant, narrow minded asshole called her a 'kid'. And the fact that everyone in the building knew about it but still had no amount of respect to even consider her wishes, made them all part of her blacklist.

She didn't like the way it made her feel and she was definitely not a fan that they said it in a way that made her think that she was anything less inferior - nothing but an innocent child who paid the captain occasional visits to give him a messed up doodle of 'the importance of love and friendship!'. Like she was just a game to them. Like she didn't just get sent to the academy because she shot her dad in between the eyes.

"Is that what the girl at the bar told you when Mr. C let you out a week ago?" Betty found her words flowing out spontaneously and the groups surrounding them snickered. _'Fuck. And there goes the shit.'_

Jerry's eyes momentarily flickered and darkened. _'Yeah, that's right. Get angry, you wonton cretin. Let's see it.'_ It was her turn to smile.

Anger was strictly prohibited in the academy because the masters didn't want any fights breaking out - kind of like a more illiberal prison. If students ever had the need to punch someone, they'd know better than to strike at the moment. Instead it was advised that they let out whatever steam they had in the training hall by destroying punching bags or whacking the dummies with a staff. Disobeying the rule was punishable with cleaning the stables and the toilets, as well the large pool located in the west wing, alone. And _no one_ wanted to go to the west wing. It was locked for an ungodly reason, which Betty found out after a night of being hazed.

But she wasn't one to let her anger out physically. Luckily, she was able to have her favourite room to cool off. She had to admit, while being called a kid can be triggering, she was a bit pleased that the captain viewed her as one, just enough to grant her access to the shooting range whenever she liked and allowed her an early take on the following week’s desserts.

"Well, that's one dirty assumption for a measly ten year old," Jerry said, striding closer, offering what little dignity he had left on display, until they were nose to nose.

Well, chest to nose.

Jerry was tall and stood in front of her like a fucking tower. Although he didn’t let it show, the shine of his dark blue orbs swirled with wrath from being discredited by a child. His smirk screamed that he wanted to hit her right then and there but Betty didn't care. She's been hit so many times before during hand to hand combat classes so him doing it now didn't matter.

_'Besides, if he does, I'm gonna make him eat all the horse shit he'd be cleaning soon.'_

"Oh. I'm so sorry— " Betty voiced and he smirked, thinking she had apologized and let him have his self-respect back." —that she screwed you to the point of memory loss. I'm thirteen. And a half. But was it _that_ good?? Let me guess, you didn't last for more than thirty seconds, right? It being your first time with something other than your hand and all." Were the phrases she heard from her roommates from time to time. She didn't entirely know what they meant, just that they were highly sexual and an insult.

Betty barely even knew anything about sex until one of her roommates took the pledge to teach her all that she needed and wanted to know. And the said teacher, who was a few feet away from her just spit out his drink in shock, his boyfriend coming to rub his back.

When she faced Jerry again, he had his chest thrusted out as his nostrils flared. His body trembled in absolute anger. That time he looked like he was ready to kill her. But before he even had the chance to raise his hand, Betty kicked him in the groin as hard as she could, cackled, and ran when he doubled over with a groan-like scream.

"You little shit," she heard him growl loudly, hands clutching in between his legs like it was going to soothe both the pain of being kicked and being laughed at. "You're dead! You hear me?! When I get my hands on you, you're dead!"

_'You gotta find me first, dickhead,'_ Betty grinned.

He didn't. No one knew where she hid for two days and she was proud of the new record. The smallest amount of time it took for someone to find her was forty five minutes.

That is, until she played with one Forsythe Pendleton Jones III.

Betty missed hide and seek and it had only been a few minutes since she made a deal with her new boyfriend.

_“If you find me in less than thirty minutes, I’ll give you five kisses,”_ she told him and he agreed almost immediately. His eagerness had her reminding him to count.

One to one hundred, and she had already gotten in a crate hidden in the library when he reached forty and sent him a message to begin his search.

_‘Perhaps I should’ve said forty five. Jug’s still new to this,’_ Betty thought, pursing her lips. She guessed that it would at least take him an hour but all it took was ten minutes. Ten minutes for the crate to open. Ten minutes to erase her small smile and make her jaw drop in shock.

There he stood, holding up the wooden cover, looking down at her with his tired eyes and lopsided smirk, his beanie eating his raven hair perfectly.

Betty’s heart started pounding in her ears. The gears of her brain turned to reason with what was happening. She swiftly opened her phone and it had indeed only been ten minutes since they started. _‘What - ’_

“Found you,” Jughead said softly after she made no moves to talk.

_‘Ten minutes,’_ she furrowed his eyebrows. _‘TEN FUCKING MINUTES._ _No. This isn’t happening.’_

There was a reason Betty loved the game so much. Hiding wasn’t just something she was good at and decided to flaunt, it was her main coping mechanism. The longer it took for someone to find her, the better she felt. It makes her feel equal to others after how many times they shove her in the muds of both reality and fantasy. It was a way to show herself that she had something they didn’t, or that her ability was just as special as theirs. It got rid of names. The voices. And for a boy - whom she had only known for two months - to find her in just ten minutes was like putting her back on rock bottom. 

_“Make it harder next time, will you,_ **_kid_ ** _,”_ their words suddenly came back all together.

_“What’s a kid doing here?”_

_“Are you lost, kid?”_

_“Sorry, kids aren’t allowed inside.”_

_“For such an innocent, little kid - ”_

“You okay, Betts?” She heard Jughead say as he took her hand, pulling her up and out the crate.

“You. . .” Betty didn’t exactly know what to say to him. She didn’t want to get mad at him for something he didn’t mean to do and knew nothing about but she panicked. “How the hell did you find me?”

“Betty, there’s nowhere in the world where I wouldn’t be able to find you,” he replied. On other days she would have found it sweet, but due to emotions starting to freak out, his words felt like a knife to the gut. “So. . .where are my kisses?”

She thought long and hard until she said: “Let’s do it again. You find me in twenty minutes, I’ll double it.”

Jughead smiled once more and gestured at the open door. 

Betty ran. She ran as fast as she could, eyes skimming along every detail of the rooms she passed and decided whether it was good enough to hide in. She soon came across a dumbwaiter in one of the empty classrooms at the farthest hall and locked herself in it, making sure that it lifted her to the middle of the third and second floors.

She didn’t text him this time but she kept her eyes on the changing numbers on her phone. A minute passed, like before. Two. Ten. Twelve. Fifteen.

_‘He’s not going to make it,’_ Betty sighed in relief, turning the device off and laughed at herself. But then the wall moved. Someone was pulling the dumbwaiter up and she felt a lump rise in her throat as she looked at the time. 

10:46 AM

_‘Sixteen minutes. It’s probably just someone else. Don’t worry, Betty.’_

_“You know better than to take in kids, captain.”_

_“She’s just a kid.”_

The small door opened and she was met with Jughead’s scarred face once more. Before she could think, she blurted out: “Triple or nothing!”

She wasted no time in jumping to her feet, running faster that ever, mindlessly bumping into other students as she frantically searched every hidden corner. It was getting harder to breathe now. In her mind, _they_ stared at her. They stared and laughed and pointed and talked and fucking locked her up in the goddamn haunted part of the school overnight until she couldn’t look at another mirror from the things she had seen.

But then she started presuming that maybe Jughead was cheating. She didn’t like thinking about it but there were endless reasons to indicate that he was.

  1. Stonewall prep had cameras everywhere - obviously to watch a bunch of misguided criminals flourish their shit around. 
  2. Some people might have told him where she went.
  3. She had her phone with her the entire time. Maybe he put a tracker on it or her.



With the last notion, she threw her phone away and took off her sweater as well as her shoes, leaving them scattered along the way.

The number of faces decreased the farther she got until she was completely alone. Betty had no idea where she was. She wasn’t even sure if the place was part of the school anymore, just that she was standing in front of a rusty metal door. It looked wrong. It felt like it too. But she was desperate to calm herself down.

It creaked loudly as she pulled it open. Surprisingly it wasn’t locked and she was met with an unpleasant smell of what seemed to be a mixture of decaying cement and hellbroth. She tried not inhaling from her mouth.

On the other side was no room. It was dark, but it seemed like another passage leading _somewhere._ Betty had no desire to find out as she slumped on the soiled wall she was using as a guide, going down and down until she had her head buried on her knees. 

_“You have to be older to hold a gun, pumpkin.”_ Flashes of her father invaded her mind. The time she had accompanied him during a hunt. When she watched him shoot down a wolf. When she shot him down the same way a month later.

_“You’re just a kid, Betty! But go ahead,”_ Hal told her. He knew but he told her. He _asked_ her to. 

_‘I’m not - ’_

She clutched her head and clenched her jaw as her memories glitched, forming different kinds of images that eventually hurt her lungs, her eyes, her ears. It went on and on and on. Their words ran like a bullet train until she wasn’t sure they were only ever in her head anymore. They turned into incoherent whispers. Faster. Slower. Fainter. Faster. Louder. She could practically feel them pushing her face to the ground with their feet.

Betty screamed, wanting to simply pull them out of her system.

“Betty!” She heard someone call out her name and when she opened her eyes, he was there. He looked worried, but he had found her again. His phone was on the ground providing all the amount of light it could offer as she smiled.

_‘How?’_

“Jug,” she said and he visibly winced. Her voice was so weak and hoarse, it cracked with just one word, like she had been screaming for an entire day. “When did you get here?”

Unbeknownst to her, tears cascaded from her waterline down to her cheeks while her eyes were bloodshot. Jughead cleared her face of the tiny strands of hair and placed a kiss on her forehead.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said but Betty felt giddy, unable to process anything he was saying. “Come on. That’s enough hide and seek for today. Let’s go get you some rest.”

Just as he guided her up to her feet, her knees buckled and she collapsed in his arms. The world turned black for the blonde. There was nothing and she was alone again, sitting in the same position she had in the dark, mysterious hall.

_‘Would he be able to find me here?’_ Her hand felt warm not a second later. She smiled. _‘Hi, Juggie.’_

Even without him beside her she heard him. Just as she was about to give up, he said:

“Next time, we’re hiding together, yeah?”

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I hope you guys enjoyed episode 3. Why do you think Jughead’s able to find her so fast?


End file.
